Posts By Nicholas Charney

The Bazaar World of Fearless Advice 2.0

It’s no surprise that our role as civil servants is changing. One can hardly browse a civil service centric publication from the developed world that doesn’t start by framing drivers of change: big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and technologically driven disruptive innovation in well-established regulatory markets (e.g. AirBNB, Uber, etc) to name but a few.Read… Read more »

We all have our defining moments

Mine happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. I was in university at the time, working as a front desk agent for a hotel here in Ottawa. I spent a number of years with the company and during that time I was fortunate enough to have met thousands of people fromRead… Read more »

Witty Ts for Government Worker Bees at NextGen!

Last year I teamed up with a brilliant designer here in Ottawa to found a company that aims to bring a little more fun into the public service. Together we’re redefining private-public partnerships by delivering a witty set of designer Ts that are either positively encouraging, derisively subversive, and perfectly ironic to office workers acrossRead… Read more »

A Noteworthy Example of Authenticity

Originally published to cpsrenewal.ca Last week I leaned heavily on a speech made by Allan Gregg to try to position authenticity as the antidote to the problem of facelessness (see: The Solution to Facelessness is Authenticity); a problem that I argued the week before that was not some abstract thing out there but rather oneRead… Read more »

The Solution to Facelessness is Authenticity

Originally published at cpsrenewal.ca In my last piece I positioned problem of the facelessness bureaucracy not as an abstract problem that manifests between civil servants and the citizens they serve, but rather a very real problem between civil servants themselves (See: The Real Problem of Facelessness) and in so doing encouraged individual public servants toRead… Read more »

The real problem of facelessness

Originally published at cpsrenewal.ca I wrote a few weeks ago about the facelessness of bureaucrats (See: How Can Bureaucrats Be Interesting When the World Demands that they be Boring), the ensuing conversation focused a lot on the question of whether or not bureaucrats can remain faceless given the pressures of the new media environment. WhatRead… Read more »

The Public Promise of Big Data

Originally posted to cpsrenewal.ca Right now the web is awash with articles about Big Data; it seems like everyone is getting caught up in the rush. I myself even declared that Big Data will become one of the most important policy inputs over the next 10 years (See: Big Data, Social Media, and the LongRead… Read more »

Pivots, badges, a new contributor, and bureaucratic ipsum

Hi All – You may have noticed things changing around the blog recently – new logos, new pages, the bio of a new contributor – in short, I’m widening the tent, bringing people in, and trying to branch out into a couple of different things. First, last week’s post (See: Big Data, Social Media, andRead… Read more »